NaNoWriMo Day 7: 9,474 words and counting

Rough doodle for possible title treatment for novelizaiton of "Shifters".

Rough doodle for possible title treatment for novelizaiton of "Shifters".

National Novel Writing Month 2017 is now officially 1 week old. I am now 7 days in, and very close to the 10K word mark. I have to say that at this point I feel okay about things, but I'm starting to get a bit nervous. I find myself overthinking things more and more. I'm starting to get a bit cautious, too-- with feelings of the dreaded "writer's block" threatening my flow. It's tough, but I'm pushing through regardless!

So far I am finding the process a LITTLE bit disappointing. I had assumed that going off of an old screenplay would actually hasten the process, and it has in many respects...but I'm finding that my pace is no different than if I just wrote an outline of notes. They say that adapting books into movies is difficult, but trying to adapt a movie script into a book is a bit of a pain-in-the-ass!

Page 1 of the screenplay for "Shifters," written (and printed out) in the late 90s.

Page 1 of the screenplay for "Shifters," written (and printed out) in the late 90s.

I'm very much used to writing in shots and dialogue. That's the one thing they teach you in screenwriting-- economy! That's why most screenplays are less than 120 pages- that's up to 1 minute of screen time per page. My challenge is converting this quippy screenplay writing into sprawling a descriptive novel writing. And it's HARD!!!!!!! I mean, my difficulty is definitely trying to get this entire book written in a month or less- if I had more time, I don't think I'd be struggling this much. Listen to me-- "struggle"-- as if I'm out in the cotton field with bloody fingers! 

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I need to be writing at least 1,700 words per day to make the deadline. So far, I'm falling a LITTLE short of that number. I have to force myself a bit more!

So far, I'm finding that the story works well as a novel. I'm also finding that I'm connecting a bit more with these characters. I feel that the script doesn't really do enough to explain the characters and help to provide them with proper motivation to do what they do in the story. It's not enough that I know the motivation- and I do...it's just not coming through in the story. That's likely another reason why I was getting so much "It reads like a comic book" when I first shared this script. 

I'm hoping that by the end of week two I'll have a solid 20K words written. I'm a little behind right now, but that will change. My brain is a bit fried at the moment-- I don't think I've done this much constant writing in a long time! I can't say that any of this will even make sense! In which case, I'll know what to expect when I do it again (because I will). 

Stay tuned...

Charles Conyers